Still fighting over Vietnam

Description of the Tonkin Gulf incident in the Los Angeles Times’ obituary of Robert McNamara:

Years later, historians still spar over whether the attacks were as serious as they were initially reported — and whether they justified a major escalation of the war.

Description of same, from the New York Times’ McNamara obit:

The attack never happened, as a report declassified by the National Security Agency in 2005 made clear.

I just handed in my weekly Obit-Mag column on the week’s major obits. Reading about McNamara, I was struck by how unusually harsh so much of the writing was. Not that a guy who knew Vietnam was doomed even as he continued to oversee the carnage doesn’t deserve it. It’s just that American obituaries, unlike the English variety, are usually at least somewhat sweet and reverential in the face of death. Not this time.

This is, of course, fine with me: I’m a major fan of that long-lost genre of writing, the obituary hit piece. And yet, until I opened up my Philadelphia Inquirer on Wednesday, I’d never given much thought to its visual-culture cousin, the obituary hit cartoon. Here’s the Inquirer’s Tony Auth kissing McNamara goodbye:

And that’s actually significantly sweeter than Pat Oliphant’s take:

Even former Senator Bob Kerrey, among the most famous Vietnam Vets, got into the act. In Politico, he abandoned the politicians’ boilerplate expressions of concern for the dearly departed’s family, instead offering this: “His death reminds me of death, destruction, horror and the suffering of that war…. I am not saddened by his loss. I am saddened by all the other losses.” But the toughest take of all came from McClatchy’s veteran war reporter, Joseph Galloway. I used to work with Galloway, who wrote the book We Were Soldiers Once…And Young, which is not exactly a staple of lefty bookstores and in face eventually became a Mel Gibson movie. Here’s how his encomium starts:

Well, the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell.

McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.

Read the whole thing here.

To watch straight-news obits disagree over major events and see editorialists stomp all over McNamara’s still-warm body is an oddly anachonistic feeling–a trip back to the divisions of the Vietnam era, of course, but also too a time when fat and happy media outlets worried less about pissing off partisans. In these circulation-panicked days, it’s harder to imagine any major paper running, say, a cartoon of a just-deceased Dick Cheney arriving in Hell or a columnist proudly declaring enduring hatred for the late Donald Rumsfeld.

Of course, now we have the Internet to do that for us. Establishment-media squeamishness notwithstanding, I have a feeling the future will actually be rather bright for the obit hit-piece.